Wake: A Novel (12 page)

She looked at her husband’s hands, at the spray of black hairs on the tops of his fingers.

“You have to read it, Ada.”

She took it from him.

Dear Mr. Hart,

I am very sorry to have to tell you that your son Michael died of his wounds on the 17th September.

Yours,

—

These were the only words, struck into the page. Not even a name, just a signature at the bottom, but blurred, as though it were written in haste, or in rain.

“It’s not true,” she said, looking up at him. “I’d have known if it was. It’s not true.”

No further letter came—nothing to say how their son had died. Jack wrote to Michael’s company, but they did not receive a reply. Everyone got two letters. Everyone Ada knew who had lost someone. Most got more than that: a letter from someone who had been there at the death, someone who had words of comfort, some small detail to impart.

She was sure there had been a mistake.

For a while afterward, people stopped her in the street to say how sorry they were. How he was a credit to her, as though in his dying he had somehow raised her stock. She just stood there while they talked, until they passed on again. She did not take out the mourning dress, packed in a chest at the end of her bed, folded with mothballs and tissue paper: the dress she wore last for her mother, twenty years ago.

Then, in the winter of 1918–19, when the war was over, the boys began to come home. They were everywhere suddenly, swarming the streets in their demob suits and fifteen-shilling coats. It was as though some contrary magic had occurred, over in France, as though, far from dying, they had flourished over there in the boggy fields, bred themselves again from the fertile soil. The papers were rife with stories, with miracles: boys who had been hiding behind enemy lines, had walked the whole way home, who hadn’t even known that the war had finished, but had turned up in the back garden ragged and filthy and in time for their tea.

That was when she saw him first: at the edge of a group of lads on a street corner, his back turned away from her. She went up to him; the boy turned, but it wasn’t him and she hurried away, sweaty, shaking. Then a few days later, there he was, arm in arm with a girl in the park. She started after him, calling his name. It wasn’t Michael. It kept happening. She would run after him, only stopping when she saw that it was someone else—someone the same height, with the same tilt of the head, or the same color hair. Or the boy she was following would simply disappear.

Often, restless in the night, she would leave Jack sleeping and climb into her son’s bed instead, lying on the narrow mattress in the narrow room, with the football pictures stuck to the wall. She began to see him there. She would wake to find that he was with her, sitting on the bed. She was never surprised. She reached for him, but he put his hand out, as though to stop her. There were shadows moving about nearby.

“Who are they?” she said to him.

“Shhh.” He put his finger to his lips and smiled. “Don’t worry, Mum, they’re all right. They’re only dead.”

One day, near the end of the long winter of 1918, a doctor came to the house. He gave her an injection, a quick scratch on her arm. When she came around she was back in the bedroom that she shared with Jack, and Jack was in the chair in the corner. The light was clear and cold. He came over and helped her to her feet.

“All right now,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

On their way downstairs they passed Michael’s bedroom. The door was open, the room stripped bare. Only the blank spaces and darker borders showed where his football pictures had been; only the tiny flecks of the flour and water that he had used as a paste. She looked into the room and back to her husband.

“Where are his things?” Her tongue felt too large in her mouth.

“I’ve put them away.” He looked guilty, but bullish, his jaw set tight.

She thought that she hated him then, but that even the hate seemed distant, as if it were happening to someone else—close, but hard to reach, as though trapped behind a pane of glass.

There’s a sound downstairs: The back door opening. Jack’s tread in the kitchen.

Ada scrabbles the postcards together. The sky outside the windows is dark.

“Ada?”

The meat, left at the butcher. The meal she was going to cook
.
The day, disappeared. Where has it gone? She pushes the letters down into the box, but the official letter she keeps out, slipping it into the pocket of her apron. She tries to tie the string, but her fingers are clumsy and it is useless and he is already on the stairs. She puts the box back in the wardrobe, closing it as quickly as she can. As Jack opens the door, she turns to him, smoothing down her hair.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing—I—was…cleaning.”

“In here?” He looks at her empty hands, back up to her face.

“Yes—I—haven’t been in here for months, so…I thought I’d check, see if it needed anything.” Her heart is going like the clappers.

“Cleaning with what?”

“Nothing, yet. I was—just about to start.” She feels herself flush to the roots of her hair.

Jack looks around the room, takes in the bed, the scissors, still lying there. “Looks all right to me.”

“Yes,” she says. “It does.” She edges past him, picks up the scissors, and hurries downstairs, grateful for the cool, dim kitchen. She can hear his footsteps overhead. She listens as he walks across their son’s floor. It sounds like he is standing by the window, looking out. The footsteps turn, hesitate. Will he open the wardrobe? See that the box has been disturbed? She hardly dares breathe. But the footsteps cross the floor again, then leave the room and make their way downstairs. She reaches for the sink to hold herself up.

“Dark in here.” He comes into the room behind her.

“Yes.” She lights a match to the gas. Yellow light laps the walls.

“Is there nothing to eat?”

“I’m sorry. I—forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Sorry,” she says, turning to him now.
Twenty-five years.
She waits for him to say something, to mention the date. But he doesn’t.

“I’m going to go and get a piece of fish,” he says eventually, steadily. “Would you like one, too?”

She nods, wretched.

He gets out his cap and puts it on. “I’ll see you later, then.”

She watches him go. Sinks to a chair. Thinks of the meat, left on the counter with the butcher’s boy. What must he have thought of her, that boy, running away like that? She puts her head in her hands.

Some silly woman, getting old.

Running after ghosts.

Shouting for her dead son in the street.

The field ambulance carrying the coffin passes the British and French troops who line the streets of Boulogne. It passes through the gates of the old town, then climbs the steep hill that overlooks the harbor, crossing the bridge that leads to the fortified entrance to the château and then under the great stone arch, drawing up in the courtyard, gravel crunching beneath its tires.

Eight soldiers carry the coffin along the twisting corridors of the old château, past waiting French troops, to the officers’ mess in the old library, where a temporary
chapelle ardente,
a burning chapel, has been ordained. The room has been decorated with flags and palms, its floor strewn with the yellow, orange, and red of autumn flowers and leaves.

A guard of French soldiers comes to watch over the body. All are from the Eighth Regiment and all have recently been awarded the Légion d’honneur for their conduct in the war. Candles are lit. The soldiers stand on either side of the coffin with their arms reversed, rifles held against their shoulders. One of them, a thirty-year-old veteran, looks briefly at the coffin before casting his eyes to the ground. The box is raw and rough—not the coffin of one who will be buried in state. He wonders if this understatement is a peculiarly British thing.

The British he knew in the war were crazy, funny men. One, in particular, he will never forget. He met him one night in an estaminet, just behind the lines. The English boy was eating egg and fried potatoes. That was what they all asked for, the Tommies, all the time, in their funny, blunt voices: all they wanted: Egg and chips! Egg and chips! This one was small and stocky. When the French soldier sat down in front of him with his beer and the Tommy looked up, the solider knew, without speaking, what they would do to each other before too long. And they did: at the back of a ruined church, by ancient gravestones, their bellies full of beer and fried food.

Afterward, he remembers, the boy broke down and cried. And he knew that it was not for what they had done, or not really, but for everything else. And they held each other, between the crumbled stones, until the birds started singing and a bleached sun rose over the remains of the church.

That was in June 1916, just before the Somme.

The French soldier stares at the ground, blazing with color in the candlelight. He looks at the leaves, at the flowers at his feet.

Evelyn packs up her satchel, preoccupied. Robin spoke to her as he left, and she replied to him, but now that he has gone, she cannot recall anything of what either of them said. She has even forgotten to be angry with him for earlier, for interfering with Rowan Hind. She switches off the lights and stands there for a moment, looking out. Through the window, the afternoon sky, which had looked already black with the lights on, is revealed to be a high, deepening blue.

Captain Montfort.

She conjures the man’s face when he’d said the name. He’d looked frightened. Plenty of men every day look frightened. Was that a reason not to help him?

She pulls on her hat and coat and walks down the dark corridor, stepping onto the street, bringing her keys up to lock the door.

“Evelyn?”

She lets out a yelp and jumps back, dropping the keys, her hand at her throat. Robin is standing in the gloom of the doorway beside her.

“For God’s sake, you frightened me.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” He bends toward her keys on the ground. She realizes that he is going to try to pick them up.

She bends down and swipes them up herself. His face is pale in the darkness. “Well?” she says eventually. “What is it? Have you forgotten something? Do you need to get back in?” The light is fading. She wants to get to the park before it closes. She passes the keys through her fingers, making no effort to disguise the irritation in her voice.

“I—I just wanted to ask something.”

“What was that?”

He steps forward. “I often go along to dances in the evening and—I wondered if. Well…” He straightens himself to his full height, his face looming above her. “Cut a long story and all that, I wondered if you’d like to come along. There’s a rather good Dixie band on Thursday night. Armistice Day. Thought I might mark it, you know. Do something different. Not so bleak.”

She takes a step away from him. “No,” she says. “Thank you, Robin.”

“Oh.” The air leaves him. “Other plans?”

She waves her hand, something noncommittal.

He turns his hat over in his hands. “Then, some other time, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

There’s a silence. “Well. Can I?” He gestures toward the Underground. “Are you?”

“No. I’m walking home.” She stops herself before mentioning the park. She doesn’t want him walking along beside her with that leg; going out of his way. It occurs to her that she has no idea where he lives—that she knows next to nothing about him at all.

He nods. “Well, tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I meant, see you then,” he says, and turns to go.

She buttons her coat all the way up to her neck. “Robin?”

“Yes?” He turns back toward her, his face expectant.

“In the future, I’ll thank you not to interfere.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My shell-shock case. Everything was in hand.”

“Oh.” He takes a pace toward her. “I’m sorry. It’s just something that I learned in France. Sometimes it—well, it rather seems to work.”

“I’d rather you didn’t try out your methods on my time.”

There’s a silence. Beside them, on the pavement, people thicken in the home-going dusk. “Of course.” He nods. “I’m sorry. Till tomorrow then.”

She turns and walks away from him, out onto the main road, heading in the opposite direction, happy to put distance between them, to let herself be swallowed by the crowds. She pushes against the tide making for the tube and turns right, heading up Parkway.
Robin?
Asking her to a dance? It’s almost funny. Perhaps he was just being kind, taking pity on her. Or, then again, perhaps he had it all planned; the conference of the afflicted: they could shuffle inexpertly around the dance floor together; she could talk about her missing finger, and he could talk about his missing leg.
Dance?
She hasn’t danced for years. The thought is almost obscene.

Fewer people are about when she reaches the entrance to the park. The iron gates are open. They are supposed to shut at dusk, but dusk has come an hour earlier since the turning back of the clocks two weeks ago. But there is no sign of the park keeper yet. Once inside the gates, she takes big, greedy gulps of air, eyes hungry for the last of the light, walking fast up the steep rise of the hill, glad to be moving after the day spent sitting down, hands swinging by her sides, feeling the blood rise in her cheeks.

Her heart lifts when she reaches the top, and she sees that her bench is free, and that, apart from a few solitary dog walkers, scattered across the hill beneath, no one else is around. Below, on one of the many paths that lattice the grass, the lamplighter is moving slowly, a trail of small yellow fires in his wake. Low clouds race one another across the gunmetal sky. Despite the cold she pulls off her gloves and puts her palms down flat against the rough wood of the bench.

This is where they sat, here on this seat, she and Fraser, under a burning sky. Three years and four months ago; the seventh of July; three o’clock in the afternoon; the last hour that she spent with him on earth.

He’d written to her at the end of June 1917. He’d been told he was getting ten days at home, the first in months. He was lucky. Lots of leave had been canceled. There was something big coming up. He would have to go to Scotland to visit his family, but, depending on the trains, he would have two days at least at the end.